The most recent ARCast hosted by Ron Jacobs is part 1 on the Office 2007 System. This show is a great overview of the range of new features available in this product release. Some of the main points I took from this session were:
- Results Gap – another term for the difference between the expected ROI of a product/technology and the actual adoption it receives. In light of the Office 2007 System, where application developers can really leaverage the functionality within the Office suite, this gap can be significantly reduced by building an interface into an existing product. This is of course one of the reasons Intilecta has chosen Outlook as one of its primary user interfaces.
- PDF Support – Pulled, but not forgotten. What I hadn’t realised with regards to PDF support being pulled from the Office 2007 release is that it will be available as a download from the Microsoft website. Very cool for businesses wishing to use the new functionality of Office 2007 to generate documents for general distribution. Update: Found it Here
- Business Data Catalog – “Business Data Catalog, a new feature introduced in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, provides an easy way to integrate business data from back-end server applications, such as SAP or Siebel, within Office SharePoint Server 2007 without writing any code.” [MSDN website] This feature sounds way cool and looks like a great technology for bring together disparate data stores for integration into front end (web and rich client) applications. Of course, now all we need is a way to access this data when we’re not connected to the corporate network.